


a million bad habits to kick

by Joana789



Series: tumblr fics [3]
Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: Childhood Friends, Fighting, Friends to Lovers kinda? idk idk, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, but barely there, mentions of blood and some minor injuries but nothing graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 15:59:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19726951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joana789/pseuds/Joana789
Summary: ”Eliott?” Lucas picks up after only a couple of seconds, even though it’s a Friday night, and he sounds urgent but also like he knows what’s coming. ”Are you okay?”Eliott only says, ”Um. I think so?” and then, ”Can you pick me up?”They do that a lot. This is not the first time they’ve had this conversation, and not the second, and not the tenth. At the other end of the line, Lucas sighs, the sound heavy and cracking like electricity through the speaker of Eliott’s phone. ”Text me the address.”Eliott does, fumbling with his phone a little. The knuckles of his right hand are an angry red.





	a million bad habits to kick

**Author's Note:**

> title from lorde's "a world alone" because i'm that original
> 
> originally posted on my [tumblr](http://oheliotts.tumblr.com)  
> 

It starts like it always starts: Eliott is at a party, pleasantly tipsy and bordering on slightly drunk, vaguely aware of Idriss flirting with a girl at the other end of the room and Sofiane a couple of meters away from him with a phone in his hand, probably texting Imane, when there’s a commotion somewhere near. Somebody is yelling something, the words harsh, mixing with the pounding music spilling out of the speakers, and Eliott turns in the direction of it but doesn’t catch anything substantial, and then somebody shoves someone else into the middle of the crowd, and then they throw the first punch, and after that goes the second and the third, and Eliott ends up, as he always somehow does, in the middle of it. He only notes the familiar rush of adrenaline spiking through his veins, blurs of colour and sounds that melt together around him and sharp shots of pain that tear through the haze of alcohol in his mind, but they’re brief, barely there and gone again. Eliott jumps into it; adrenaline kicks in.

It ends like it always does: when the crowd disperses, he calls Lucas.

”Eliott?” Lucas picks up after only a couple of seconds, even though it’s a Friday night, and he sounds urgent but also like he knows what’s coming. ”Are you okay?”

Eliott only says, ”Um. I think so?” and then, ”Can you pick me up?”

They do that a lot. This is not the first time they’ve had this conversation, and not the second, and not the tenth. At the other end of the line, Lucas sighs, the sound heavy and cracking like electricity through the speaker of Eliott’s phone. ”Text me the address.”

Eliott does, fumbling with his phone a little. The knuckles of his right hand are an angry red.

Outside, where Sofiane had dragged him and Idriss when the fight at the party subsided, is chilly and dark and enveloping. Eliott sits down on the pavement and then looks up at the sky and tries to count the stars, but they’re blurry, and he gets lost very quickly. To his right, Idriss is saying something; Eliott only catches the tail of it, and then Sofiane is saying, ”Imane’s going to be so pissed at you.”

”She always is,” Idriss says, which is true. ”How come you look like you didn’t get punched even once?”

”Because I didn’t,” is Sofiane’s answer, and Eliott doesn’t have to look at him to know that he’s smiling like he’s proud of himself. He should be.

Time gets blurry. Eliott’s head swims a little, because of the adrenaline leaving his system like air escaping a tire that someone had made a hole in, and because of the effect of the alcohol getting weaker with his every exhale. He looks at his phone and it’s almost midnight, and then he blinks and it’s almost half past.

Then, Eliott blinks again and opens his eyes to the sight of Lucas stepping out of his car, the headlights a little blinding.

Eliott smiles. His lower lip hurts a little as he does it.

Even in the halo of blinding car lights and just after Eliott got punched, Lucas still looks gorgeous. His hair is a mess, and he shuts the door behind him with a little more force than necessary, and Eliott looks at the movements, thinking they’re, somehow, graceful. In his half-sober mind, it makes sense.

To his right, also sitting on the pavement now, Idriss whoops, ”Hi, mister best friend!”

Lucas shoots him a glare. ”Had fun tonight, Idriss?”

Idriss flashes him a bright smile and shows a thumbs-up. Eliott thinks he can see a bruise blooming on his cheek. ”You should have been there to see. They got their asses handed back to them.”

”I’m sure.” Lucas is crouching in front of Eliott, now; Eliott had somehow missed the moment he moved from his car to over here. His gaze feels like x-rays scanning Eliott’s face.

Eliott tells him, still stupidly happy to see him, ”Hey,” and when Lucas doesn’t respond, only tilts Eliott’s head to the side with two fingers pressing at the side of his jaw, now frowning, he adds, ”Aren’t you going to say ”hey” back?”

”I didn’t drive all this way to say ”hey”,” Lucas tells him. There’s an edge to his voice Eliott can’t pinpoint. ”Can you stand?”

Eliott drags himself to his feet in response. The street around him tilts and wobbles a little, but he manages. As he straightens up, he feels Lucas’s steadying grip settle around his side. Lucas turns away from him again to look over at where Idriss is. ”Do you guys need a ride, too?”

”No, I called a cab,” Sofiane answers. ”Only wanted to make sure you didn’t abandon Eliott here in the middle of the street.”

”Tempting,” Lucas says, casts Eliott a glance. A part of Eliott wants to get vaguely offended, but in the end, he only leans a little more heavily into Lucas’s touch. ”But he’s lucky this time, I guess. Take care of yourselves on your way back, okay?”

”Sure thing!” Idriss pipes up, makes some sort of weird salute-like gesture and sways a bit on the sidewalk.

”Say ”hi” to Imane from me,” Lucas tells them as a goodbye, which makes Sofiane grin brightly, and then Eliott is being dragged to the car.

The ride is silent. They get in, Lucas gets the engine started, and then they go, past dim street lights and groups of people on the sidewalks. Eliott watches it all move past him, feeling the dull throbbing of pain light up somewhere around his ribcage, embers that will soon turn into worse, and tries to ignore it. He reaches to turn on the radio at one point, presses the ”on” button, notes the scratches on his left hand. Lucas turns the radio off as soon as Eliott’s hand falls back into his lap.

He casts Lucas a glance, but the boy is watching the road, intently. His fingers are gripping the steering wheel so hard they look pale.

It gets to Eliott, then, that Lucas is angry. It’s rolling off of him in waves.

He opens his mouth to say something, but before he can, Lucas cuts in with a curt, ”Don’t. Don’t, okay?” and then he takes a breath, as if to steady himself, before adding. ”At least wait until we get back.”

So Eliott nods and doesn’t say a word.

(It had all started at thirteen when Eliott first got diagnosed with his bipolar. He was awful at fighting, barely knew how to throw a half-decent punch and he’d gotten into his first fight on a complete accident, but back then, it made him feel— stronger. In control, even when he got his ass beat. Everybody around him kept telling him that there was something wrong with the way his brain worked, and he’d asked them, his parents and the doctors and the nurses, _how do I fix it, then?_ and they just kept saying there was nothing he could do.

When he got into a fight, he could at least somewhat control the outcome of it. It felt good, back then. Made him feel better.)

He opens his eyes when he feels the car stop, and then Lucas cuts the engine and gets out without a word, so Eliott does, too, a little sluggishly. He’s mostly sober at this point; it means there’s nothing left to really dull the throbbing around his ribs anymore, or the pain on the side of his jaw, or in his right hand. It takes him a moment to fish the keys to his apartment out of his pocket; Lucas keeps looking at him as he does it, wincing. When they get upstairs to his front door, he takes the keys out of Eliott’s hand, careful even despite the storm in his eyes, and unlocks the door himself.

And again, this is not the first time they’ve done this, so here they are, both moving to the kitchen out of habit, where Eliott sits down at the kitchen table and Lucas gets the first aid kit from the cupboard above the sink. When he opens it, bandages and antiseptics and band-aids spill out. Eliott watches as Lucas scans the whole mess, chooses what he needs.

(So at thirteen, he fought because it made him feel in control of something, as stupid as it sounds — in charge of something, at last. Then, at fifteen, boys who got into fights were the cool ones and it was easier to impress the girls like that. At eighteen, he was doing it because he was good at it.

Now, it's almost like a habit.)

Under the glaring lights in Eliott’s small kitchen, too bright for how late it is, Lucas’s eyes are a blazing fire. Eliott watches, unsettled, swallowing down nervously, as Lucas uncaps a bottle of an antiseptic and wets a cotton pad with it.

He says, more just to cut through the silence between them than anything else, ”Can I talk, now?”

Lucas is tense when he replies, ”That depends on what you want to say.”

It comes out harsh but stands in clear contrast to how carefully Lucas presses the cotton pad to somewhere above Eliott’s right eyebrow, to some wound he wasn’t even aware of. It stings now, faintly. ”Will you believe me if I say that I didn’t do it on purpose this time?”

Lucas scoffs. He presses the cotton pad to Eliott’s skin a little harder, until Eliott has to hold back a wince. ”You never do it on purpose.” Lucas grabs another cotton pad and moves onto a spot on Eliott’s cheekbone, now. He doesn’t look Eliott in the eyes. ”And somehow it keeps happening anyway. Life is so strange, huh?”

It sounds bitter. Eliott licks his lower lip and only realises that it's split when he tastes blood. ”I’m just in the wrong places at the wrong time.”

”Sure,” Lucas tells him. His hand trembles a little, then stops, and something quivers in Eliott’s chest when he realises that Lucas is probably suppressing the motion so that Eliott doesn’t see. Lucas is angry, yes, but it’s a different kind of anger from what Eliott usually receives at times like these; this one’s quieter. Runs deep, mixed with something else. ”Every other week, without fail, it’s just bad luck. Keep telling yourself that.”

”Lucas, I’m—”

”No,” Lucas cuts him off, second time tonight. He swipes the cotton pad over the line of Eliott’s jaw, where Eliott can feel the heat of a bruise forming already. ”Let me just clean you up, okay? I really don’t need your excuses right now.”

”I don’t have any excuses, I just—”

”Eliott,” Lucas says, and suddenly, it sounds— frail. Like Lucas is trying to keep himself together, and failing a little. Like he’s tired and doesn’t know what to do about it.

(At thirteen, when Eliott had started doing it, Lucas had been there, too. He was there to get Eliott some ice for his aching shoulder where one of the other guys had hit him, and he wrapped Eliott’s hand in a cold wet towel, hoping it would help with the pain. It didn’t, but Lucas had been there anyway, eleven and scared and confused, asking, _What happened?_ )

So they sit in silence. Lucas keeps his hands busy and gets the job of cleaning up Eliott’s cuts and wounds done efficiently, with practice. Eliott feels the pain in his ribcage rise with his every inhale, then settle when he exhales, like a tide. He presses a hand to his ribs, involuntarily, and it does nothing to ease the pain, but Lucas’s hand on Eliott’s face jerks when he notices.

”Does it hurt?” he asks, immediately passing a hand next to where Eliott’s palm is pressed, gentle. The anger in his voice gets overpowered by something else, temporarily at least, and Eliott pinpoints it as worry. ”Do you think they’re broken?”

Eliott shakes his head. This is not how a broken rib would feel. ”No, I don’t think so,” he says. Lucas sends him a doubting look, so he attempts a smile. ”It’s probably just a couple of bruises.”

Lucas sighs at that and turns his eyes away again, too quickly. ”You’re an idiot.”

Eliott smiles again. ”I know. Sorry.”

He wants to say more but swallows it down. Lucas moves down to his right hand now, looks at his bloody knuckles and bruised tender skin. Here, too, the antiseptic stings, but Eliott says nothing, only bites the inside of his cheek and counts his breaths and stares at a spot in front of him just to have something to focus on. Lucas’s fingers are cool and careful. Eliott has to stop himself from turning his palm over and catching Lucas’s hand in his own.

Then, Lucas says, ”I’m just— scared, you know.”

In the heavy silence, it rings like school bells. Eliott flits his gaze up to him as Lucas tries to get the rest of what he wants to say out, his eyes full of something, at one in the morning in Eliott’s tiny kitchen. He looks down, then up onto Eliott, then down again.

Eliott asks, ”Of what?”

”I’m scared,” Lucas repeats and then stops. His fingers, gripping Eliott’s wrist, tremble. He swallows. ”I’m scared that one day I’ll get a call and it won’t be from you but from some hospital, or police, or— just—”

Eliott breathes in, deep. Next to the pain throbbing in his ribcage, something behind his sternum unfurls and blooms, acute and present.

”I don’t know what I’d do if that happened. And I’m tired,” Lucas goes on. As if to emphasise the words, his hold on Eliott loosens. Eliott catches Lucas’s hand before it slips away and Lucas lets him, but something passes over his face when he looks down on their fingers intertwined in Eliott’s lap. ”I’m tired of seeing you like this. It’s exhausting, having to constantly worry about you.”

And— _oh_. Eliott blinks, trying to push an abrupt sting in his chest away. ”That’s how it works with me,” he shrugs, aiming for nonchalance, but it just comes out stiff. ”It’s kind of written into my medical file.”

Lucas sighs. ”That’s not I mean, you idiot,” he says, because of course he knows, even without Eliott saying it out loud, about how in everything he does, there’s this underlayer of his fucked up, badly wired brain. It’s there, gnawing at his subconscious, saying, _you’re a burden_ , even when Lucas has told him, time and time again, that he’s everything but. ”I mean you getting punched by other people.”

( _It’s just who you are_ , Lucas had told him, eleven and soft, eleven and already always there when Eliott needed him. Eliott had cried, then, curled into Lucas and let him cradle his head and cried because his jaw hurt where a hit landed and his heart hurt in his chest, and Lucas just held him, saying, _there’s nothing wrong with that_.)

”If it’s so exhausting, then why do you always pick up the phone anyway, when I call?” he asks.

Lucas turns his eyes away, looks at the bandages on the table, the mess of the cotton wipes, now some stained red. Then, very quietly, he says, ”You know why.”

Eliott does.

They’ve been friends ever since Eliott can remember, first scrawny kids and then stupid teenagers and now this, here. Eliott thinks Lucas is the most beautiful person he’s ever known. They’ve seen each other at their best and at their worst, and Lucas had been there when Eliott got diagnosed, and Eliott had been there when Lucas’s asshole of a father left him and his mom, and they’ve seen everything, everything.

They’re friends, but sometimes he looks at Lucas and his heart does something weird, squeezes and then stutters and Eliott has to fight the urge to reach out and press Lucas against him and hide his face in Lucas’s hair. Sometimes he catches Lucas watching him, colour high in his cheeks, eyes wide and bright, as if with some kind of realisation. There’s something to say about how it’s Lucas that Eliott always calls first, after he gets his ass beat, or after an episode, or just after a bad day. There’s something to say about how Lucas always picks up, and how his first question is always, _Are you okay?_

So they’re friends, but they’re also more than that. They’re almost together, Eliott sometimes thinks, but not quite. It’s like they’re standing at the edge of something big and scary, and they’re watching the scales tip but are too afraid to make a move.

 _That’s okay_ , Eliott thinks, _we have time_. And then, a little stupidly, _it's us against the world, me and you._

At one in the morning in his tiny, brightly-lit kitchen, he holds his best friend’s hand, breathes through the pain in his ribs, then squeezes Lucas's hand tight and feels Lucas squeeze back.

Something shifts, then, and Eliott notices it like he notices everything about Lucas, with a shiver down his spine. He lifts their hands to his lips and presses his mouth to Lucas’s knuckles, can hear the barely-there catch in Lucas’s breath above him as he does it and fights a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. The smile wins when Lucas steps closer and presses a kiss to Eliott’s hair in response, once, twice, and then Eliott feels his fingers brushing the strands away from his face.

”I’m still angry at you,” Lucas tells him, except he doesn’t sound like it anymore, not really; his eyes are a different kind of storm now. His hand slides down to cradle Eliott’s cheek, then his thumb brushes over Eliott’s cheekbone where a cut stings slightly.

”I know.”

”You look like hell.” Lucas’s fingers move over to brush over his bottom lip where it’s split.

Eliott chuckles. ”Thank you.”

”Can’t you find yourself a different hobby,” Lucas asks and it would sound like a friendly suggestion except he holds on tight to Eliott's hand. Eliott kisses his knuckles again, then again. ”Like photography. Or drawing, or something, I don’t know.”

”I don’t think I would be very good at photography,” Eliott says, smiles up at Lucas despite how his lip hurts, how his jaw aches with the bruises blooming under his skin.

”You don’t know until you try,” Lucas mutters.

Eliott takes a breath. The world slows down a little, and then he blinks and it speeds up again.

It’s unexpectedly easy, then, to say, ”Okay,” and when Lucas’s eyes rise to meet his, Eliott adds, feeling brave, ”I'll try. For you.”

And for the first time tonight, brilliant and bright and hopeful, Lucas smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> bonus points to whoever guesses what eliott's new hobby is going to be :')
> 
> [ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/joana789)


End file.
